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Many Democrats supported the bipartisan bill overhauling college sports, but they don’t want to give Republicans any other wins before the midterms.
That’s likely to become obvious in two key votes Wednesday.
Senate Democrats increasingly oppose a data center-focused bill and are poised to block an insider trading bill from incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., with added voter ID requirements. They also voted down a cryptocurrency bill this month.
Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, is spearheading the data center bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House. Senate Democrats argue the proposal does nothing for consumer utility costs and don’t want to create the perception that it does.
“They’re cooked. I think Donald Trump is going to tweet five more times that he loves data centers. And that is the official position of their party,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Semafor. “This is panic.”
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Husted told reporters that “this is the only bill that has a chance to pass before the election.” But many Democrats made their resistance clear to his proposal in a caucus lunch on Tuesday. They don’t think much of giving Husted a win on a bill with voluntary requirements.
Left unsaid is the notion that handing Republicans a win on data center concerns could give the GOP new campaign fodder with weeks to go until the November elections.
Husted “gave big giant tax breaks to … these data center companies, and now he’s introducing legislation that doesn’t really address the problem,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly dismissed the bill as a “fraud.”
The bill is extremely unlikely to garner the 60 votes it needs to overcome the legislative filibuster. And Republicans are already preemptively blaming Democrats as the “party of no,” as Senate Majority Leader John Thune put it.
Republicans are also frustrated the permitting reform bill wasn’t ready to pass the Senate this month, angry about what happened to the crypto bill, and are hoping that Democrats voting down Husted’s bill will at least give them someone to blame for the lack of action on rising prices and widespread affordability concerns.
“The whole thing is just kind of to play politics about these issues and get to an election,” Thune said. Democrats “can’t take yes for an answer because they are interested in just trying to politicize everything going into the election.”
The permitting bill still seems to be in the mix for the lame duck, and Democrats say it will likely have far stronger language regulating data centers’ power usage than the Husted bill.
“I don’t think we ought to be sending the message that we’re doing something when we’re not,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “Why would we do something for show, that doesn’t really do anything, when the topic … is going to be addressed in the permitting reform bill?”